On Thu, 03 Sep 2009 13:05:38 -0400, Gene
wrote:

On Thu, 03 Sep 2009 11:02:27 -0400, NotNow penned the following well
considered thoughts to the readers of rec.boats:

|Most are in engineering, funny, though, NONE are in liberal arts!
|
|http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/degrees.asp

None, I suspect, have EVER been in liberal arts. But, then, how
civilized would we be without grammar, rhetoric, logic, geometry,
arithmetic, music, or astronomy?

Here's an interesting conundrum sparked by this thread and something I
was reading earlier this evening.

Eratosthenes was a Greek mathematician, poet, geographer, astronomer
and archivist being Chief Librarian of the Great Library of
Alexandria. Among other things, he invented the armillary sphere
(spherical astrolabe), wrote an algorithm for finding prime numbers up
to about 12,000,000 or thereabouts, calculated the circumference of
the Earth with 99% accuracy using nothing but sticks, a guy to walk
and measure the distance from Alexandria to Syene and basic geometry,
calculated the exact axis tilt of the Earth, and while his calculation
of distance to the Moon was off by about 20% (which was due to
refraction error of the atmosphere), he nailed the distance to the Sun
quite accurately, created an incredibly accurate map of the "world" as
it was known then, invented scientific chronology and wrote
extensively about the political, social and scientific events of his
time.

He was born in what is now Libya about 240 BC and did all of that
without a "university" or "college" education.

I've always been of the opinion that "education" is really curiosity
and that formal education is merely a process by which information is
presented in ways that provide some order to the process and is not
essential for one to be "educated". Some of the smartest people I've
ever dealt with have high school educations, but are well and widely
read, have sound knowledge of basic mathematics (arithmetic, geometry
and trigonometry) and an insatiable curiosity about the world the
surrounds them and what goes on in it.

There's an older woman here in town, 98 years young, who amassed a
huge fortune over the years by changing with the times, starting off
as a field hand for her father's farm and ending up owning one of the
manufacturing plants in Putnam which makes different kinds of line,
binding materials, threading machinery and the like. She was taught to
read the King James Bible and basic arithmetic by counting sheep,
cows, bales of hay, etc., and took off from there - not even an
elementary school education.

Consider this - Steve Jobs never graduated from Reed College only
spending one semester there. Wozniak dropped out of UC, Berkely after
his Freshman year, Gates dropped out of Harvard.

It's true even in the arts - Ansel Adams and Edward Weston never
attened institutes of higher "education", but became responsible for a
revolution in photography. A lot of the more famous artists and
painters like Georgia O'Keeffe didn't have a lot of formal art
education. Muscians much the same - Thelonious Monk, Artie Tatum,
etc., were self taught.

It's really a matter of what you are interested in and how much
curiosity you have that give credence to being "educated" - the formal
stuff, not so much.